Recently, OSIsoft was one of 60 founding members of the Linux Foundation's new umbrella organization - LF Edge - which seeks to establish a unified open source framework for the edge. With LF Edge, enterprises, IoT vendors, telecom providers, cloud providers, and others are coming together as a community to establish the standards for architectures, network protocols, and application development as a foundation for working together.

Last month, a team of Virginia Tech students won the prestigious 2018 Solar Decathlon Middle East in Dubai for designing and building a modular, energy-positive smart home they call FutureHAUS. The OSIsoft’s Academic Program helped the students design a state-of-the-art home through real-time data.

In heavy industry, it can be a struggle to create a complete picture of a machine’s health. Mostly, we take action based on “snapshot information” and wind up treating symptoms after they have already affected machine and system performance. This machinery snapshot data is analogous to the vital signs that a nurse takes when a patient is admitted to her ER. It’s important information, but it is not enough context to make decisions about care.

Imagine for a moment that you are going to the hospital for surgery. You check in and as they prepare to administer general anesthesia, they tell you that they no longer monitor vital signs during surgery.The surgeon calmly explains that they received your most recent medical data from your general practitioner, and they have that on file and can pull it and look at it if they need to. No need to worry - they have all your data on file and will pull it if anything goes wrong.

Now, what does this scenario have to do with the PI System and data lakes? A lot. The PI System is the EKG machine for operations, while a data lake is more like a set of patient charts.